


we two boys together clinging

by ladymemebeth



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (kind of), 1993, Aged-Up Character(s), First Kiss, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Repression, Sharing a Bed, simultaneously touch-averse and touch-starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:42:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22045807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymemebeth/pseuds/ladymemebeth
Summary: The first time Richie kissed him, Eddie did not kiss back.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 23
Kudos: 132





	we two boys together clinging

**Author's Note:**

> CW for internalized homophobia, mention of vomit, and discussion of HIV/AIDS and mental health issues (trauma, hypochondria, agoraphobia, general anxiety re: physical intimacy)

"I was an I, an opera of feeling with a very small audience." — Hilton Als

[ _not the body but the idea of the body._ ]

The first time Richie kissed him, Eddie did not kiss back. There had been a shift and the others had noticed even if they didn't say anything. Subduction, like they learned about in sixth grade science class, when two ocean plates collide and permanently alter the Earth's surface in the process. Richie had always been overly fond of physical contact, almost this side of violent in his touch, but recently he had become gentle. He sat on the sofa in Ben's basement with his arm around Eddie, lightly running his knuckles up and down the other boy’s shoulder. Everyone else was sprawled on the floor in front of them playing Kings. Bev and Bill wanted to call off the game and shotgun their beers instead; Ben wanted to protect his mother's carpet from a deluge of Miller Lite. Their conversation sounded far away, like a TV left on in the other room. 

Eddie sat very still beside Richie. This was okay, he reminded himself—Eddie had told him so, after Richie delivered a monologue to rival Shakespeare in the Barrens when the two of them were alone together last week, a monologue that culminated in the two phrases that Eddie never expected to hear out of Richie's mouth: _I like you_ and _I'm sorry._

That's okay, Eddie told him. Richie looked sickly, his face the bloodless shade of someone who is about to vomit. Pale, but not inhuman, not eyeless nor gangrenous nor oozing pus. Just the face of a seventeen-year-old boy, otherwise healthy and very very nervous. 

That's okay, Eddie said again, but he could not bring himself to explain just how okay it was. He worked his jaw, willing the words to arrive at his lips, if only to make Richie's expression morph into something slightly less miserable. 

"I," he started. Richie turned from where he had been beating a stick against a tree trunk as a distraction. "Me too," Eddie said eventually. 

Richie stared at him for a long time, his fingers clenched around the stick in his hand. Then he moved forward, and Eddie instinctively took a step back. Richie stopped. 

"Okay," he said. "Okay." 

_Thank you for understanding_ , Eddie thought as tears began to build in his throat and he watched Richie make his way through the woods until he disappeared from view. _Thank you thank you thank you._

So Richie had gotten gentler but no less earnest, his eyes bright behind his glasses when they all met up after school at the quarry, a furtive glance every so often as they passed around a joint. Mike was saying something brilliant and Stan was cackling at his own jokes and Beverly was smiling, stoned and serene. And Richie was looking at Eddie and Eddie was looking back. 

But he did not kiss him back. Eddie was a little drunk and Richie had driven them all home. The pair finally ended up in front of Eddie's house, last stop of the night. Richie climbed out of the car and opened the door for Eddie, which might have annoyed him at another point in time—he wasn't a girl, for Christ's sakes. Now he only felt his face grow warm.

"Goodnight, Eds," said Richie, and he leaned forward to press his mouth to Eddie's. 

Eddie found he could not move. He felt like he was watching a movie and seeing another person, not himself, being kissed by Richie Tozier. Except it was himself and he knew it, and still he could not bring himself to kiss back. 

Richie pulled away from him. The look of confused disappointment on his face was too much. Eddie fled towards his front door, calling back over his shoulder, "Night, Richie!"

_I'm sorry_ , he thought desperately as he changed into his pajamas, stumbling on his way to bed. _I'm sorry Richie I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry_. 

[ _not the body but what the body cannot do._ ]

Stan had been furious. He approached Eddie after school when it was just the two of them and demanded to know what was going on. I don't know, said Eddie honestly. 

"If you don't really like him, you need to tell him," Stan said. "Otherwise he'll be hung up on you forever."

Eddie was momentarily charmed by this turn of phrase, hung up—like a jacket or a towel to dry, like the end of a phone call. "I do like him," he said. "I don't know what I'm doing."

"None of us know what we're doing," Stan pointed out with his characteristic shrewdness before legging it out of the school parking lot. 

Bill had been confused. He led Eddie into the Denbroughs' kitchen through the back door and immediately went to the pantry. 

"I don't r-really get it," he told Eddie through a mouthful of peanut butter, and, frankly, Bill could have been admitting his bewilderment about any given number of topics discussed in Eddie’s characteristic rapid-fire style on their bike ride home, including Eddie's attraction to boys in general and to Richie in particular, as well as his absolute unflinching fear of kissing him. Bill didn't really get any of it, but Eddie knew he would try.

Eddie gritted his teeth together in thought. There had been a book he had pored over in the library as a kid—an encyclopedia of phobias, which now seemed eerily prescient. The entry for agoraphobia caught his eye every time he leafed through the book because it made him sad. At first he thought it made him sad because the description seemed to portray someone similar to his mother, but he came to realize that it made him sad because the situation on its own was sad, and that not everything painful had to have hurt him directly. There was a testimonial from woman who suffered the phobia who said that on a conscious level she wanted nothing more than to leave her house and rejoin the world, but every time she went to the door that led out, her body froze up. She could not step outside. The fear and anxiety was too great even as she pleaded with her own hand on the doorknob: _you have to let me do this_. And still her body would not let her. 

This was the closest explanation Eddie could come up with, and still it wasn't really accurate. There was a reason why It haunted kids more easily than adults: children tended to fear concrete things, bogeymen that took the form of specific horrors, snakes and ghosts and women in paintings. Eddie was afraid of the shape that housed him rather than the world outside of it. He was afraid of the wants of his body. He was afraid that his body would not be able to do what it needed to do to make someone—Richie—feel good, feel right. He did not feel right. He thought that now It would manifest as Richie himself, and that, too, was a kind of hurt he could not bear. 

"I don't get it either," Eddie said. Bill went to the sink and washed off his spoon before sticking it back into the jar and shoveling more peanut butter into his mouth. Eddie, his own spoon in hand, closed his eyes in gratitude. 

[ _not the body but what lives inside the body_. ]

For as long as he could remember, Eddie had considered his body as nothing more than a hazard. It was a liability to be made of flesh and blood that could become injured or infected at any moment. A body was porous, forever subject to outside elements, and Eddie resented it. Running was the only thing that made him feel strong, like his body could take him places where he actually wanted to go.

He didn't particularly enjoy anything else that was supposed to make a body feel good. In middle school when the only subject the other three could bear to discuss was how often they jerked off, Eddie had only contributed to the conversations with the occasional well-timed grimace. He didn't want to be reminded of his body's existence or its appearance or its increasingly insistent desires. He felt divorced from that part of himself, some distant thing that came into view every so often but never stayed for long because Eddie chased it out.

The leper was painfully obvious in retrospect. Eddie read about Rock Hudson in the trashy TV tabloids that piled up next to his mother's favorite armchair, and then Roy Cohn in _The_ _New York Times_ at Stan's house. It didn't matter if you were very beautiful or very, very evil: you ended up the same as the rest, if you were. Eddie read about developing medical research in the magazines on the Center Street Drug Store newsstands. A virus, like they had learned about earlier that year in science class, something that was alive and not alive simultaneously because it could only survive inside another body. Even when he knew it couldn't catch so easily he was afraid that he would get sick anyway. After the blood oath he had gone home and vomited in the toilet until he could only cough up stomach acid, forehead moist with cold sweat and his mother rapping desperately on the bathroom door. He lay awake in bed at night and thought about his own blood and the places in which it had been left behind. The body couldn't save itself, couldn't protect its own insides from the mire of the world. His mother had been right all along. 

[ _not the body but what the body is capable of_. ]

So Eddie ran. Up and down the block, around the track at Derry High: it was a similar feeling to riding his beloved bicycle but the forward motion while running was due to himself and his body alone. 

He ran to Richie's house on a Saturday morning in the rain. Richie answered the front door without his glasses, clearly having just rolled out of bed. He squinted. "Eds? What the fuck, man, you're going to catch a col—" Richie stopped when he realized just how much like Eddie he sounded. There was a joke Richie's mom liked to make about any and all of them: she could never tell where one boy ended and the other began. That bad summer had only strengthened the web of memories and trauma that linked each of them to the other, tough as spider's silk and just as difficult to untangle yourself from once you were caught by it. 

Instead of bringing him into the kitchen or sitting room the way a more polite host might have, Richie climbed the stairs to his bedroom and flopped back onto his bed. Eddie stood in the doorway, fidgeting and dripping and thinking that this whole idea had been very very stupid, until Richie instructed him to borrow some dry clothes. Eddie turned away to face the wall as he changed into a T-shirt and a pair of Richie's sweatpants, the way he always did in the locker room at school when they had to trade their own outfits for the awful school-issued PE uniforms. He didn't know if Richie was watching him. He didn't know if he wanted to glance backwards to find out. 

Eddie swam in Richie's clothes, the sweatpants’ cuffs puddled at his bare feet. He'd stripped off his underwear in addition to his own pants because he was so soaked, and his bare skin against the inside of Richie's pajamas made him feel hot despite his still-damp hair. 

Eddie thought maybe Richie had fallen back asleep as he settled himself against the headboard, but a muffled noise emerged from the mess of sheets and curly dark hair that was Richie's side of the bed. 

"What?" Eddie asked. 

Richie turned his head the other way so he was looking at Eddie. "I didn't say anything."

"Yes you did," Eddie told him, annoyed. 

Richie grunted in deference. “I said I don't get you," he mumbled eventually. When Eddie didn't say anything, he continued, "I don't know what you want from me."

"I," said Eddie. 

Richie's voice was the quietest Eddie had ever heard it. "I thought you might...I thought you liked me," he whispered. His voice, which had long since dropped into a baritone register, sounded suddenly very childlike, all breath. Eddie felt a sharp stab of panic somewhere between his spleen and his pancreas as he realized that this was the worst thing he had ever done, worse than any lie he'd told his mother or any dirty thought he'd had about his substitute math teacher, worse than shoplifting from the drug store or cheating on his final Spanish exam, worse than the singular moment in the sewer when he seriously, however briefly, considered turning around and abandoning them all for the sake of his own survival. No, this was by far the worst thing he had done in all seventeen years of his life: he had broken Richie Tozier's heart. 

“I,” he said again. That accursed vowel which represented the self, the English language’s shortest word and most difficult subject. He thought of Richie and Bev screaming along to Whitney Houston, drawing out the “I” in the chorus for as long as they could before their breath gave out: _iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii will always love you._

_I am trying,_ Eddie wished he could say aloud, hoping the other boy would pick up on his telepathic signals the way he sometimes did. _I don’t know why this is so hard. I know why this is so hard._ He concentrated on the radiation of this thought from his brain to Richie’s as he slid down further on the bed until he could look Richie in the eye. Without his glasses he looked very young, the way Eddie had only ever seen in pictures: two-year-old Richie in the bathtub, a crown of soapsuds atop his dark head. It occurred to Eddie that the few memories he had of his own life before he knew Richie and Bill and Stan were sparsely-detailed and difficult to recall. It had only ever been the four of them, really, their friendship a perpetual collision course, never far apart from one another long enough for the bruises to heal. 

“I don’t want anything from you,” Eddie said, which was somehow true and not true at the same time. 

“Great,” Richie replied sardonically. “Great to hear, Eds. Real easy. Nothing for Eddie, _check_.” He mimed ticking off an invisible to-do list. “Now what should I get for Stan? Another bird book for the collection?” 

With tremendous effort, Eddie moved his hand towards Richie’s shoulder, extending a finger to press into the bare flesh where his T-shirt sleeve had ridden up. He ran his finger over the curve of Richie’s shoulder in an imitation of the gesture Richie had done against his own arm the other night in Ben’s basement, before Eddie had fucked everything up by failing to kiss Richie back. 

“I’m,” Eddie said. _Progress!_ Another letter, a contraction, an olive branch in the form of an invisible apostrophe hanging in the air between them. He paused. “Richie.”

“No,” Richie deadpanned, “you’re Eddie.”

Eddie scrunched up his face. “Not funny,” he said.

“Ouch, Eds, you’re breakin’ my heart here, man,” said Richie, perhaps more sincerely than he intended. He drew his hand up to where Eddie’s finger had paused its procession across Richie’s shoulder. His hand which had bogarted dozens of joints and launched hundreds of paper airplanes and had once wielded a baseball bat in the dark against the most terrible thing any of them could conjure in their imaginations. His hand which had fit Eddie’s bone back into place, sharp and sudden in its tenderness. 

_You have to let me do this_ , Eddie told his body, and it relented enough to allow him to fit his fingers into Richie’s grasp. Richie hummed in surprise, then shifted slightly closer to Eddie. The mattress sighed at the movement. Their bodies did not touch except for where their hands were joined together on top of the pillow. 

[ _not the body but the space left behind in the body's absence_. ]

The second time Richie kissed him, Eddie kissed him back, just enough for it to count. The world did not end; Eddie did not begin to rot away at the mouth, nor did he suffer a heart attack. Eddie's first thought was that he tasted warm, like if summer sunlight on the back of your neck had a flavor. Richie’s breath was soft from his nose as it gusted across Eddie’s cheek. He flinched when their tongues touched but neither broke the embrace until they both shifted at the same time and their teeth clicked together. 

Richie pulled back slightly, stifling a laugh. His cheeks were sunburn-pink. “Dude, watch it. My dad’ll be pissed if you knock these pearly whites outta my head after all the work he did on them.”  Eddie closed his eyes, embarrassed. He opened them again when he felt Richie’s gentle touch against his wrist. Richie was looking at him and Eddie was looking back. 

Eddie stood on the front steps of his house as Richie reversed out of the Kaspbraks’ driveway. His lips felt strange but not unpleasant, like when he put on too much peppermint chapstick or he stayed in the quarry water for too long until he couldn't feel the edges of his own form. The sun hovered close to the horizon; the whole sky blushed.

**Author's Note:**

> title from walt whitman's leaves of grass, in an excerpt that is so richie/eddie it hurts (also [my favorite hockney painting](https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/we-two-boys-together-clinging-63580)): 
> 
> "We two boys together clinging,  
> One the other never leaving,  
> Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions  
> making,  
> Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,  
> Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,  
> No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving,  
> threatening,  
> Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on  
> the turf or the sea-beach dancing,  
> Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chas-  
> ing,  
> Fulfilling our foray."
> 
> [i'm on tumblr](https://holdoncallfailed.tumblr.com/)


End file.
